1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a telephone system which has a function of making a call to a requested telephone number based on written information read from a sheet such as a name card where the telephone number is written.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, for a telephone system disclosed, for example, as “TELEPHONE SYSTEM EQUIPPED WITH OPTICAL CHARACTER READING DEVICE” in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 6(1994)-188962 (JPA 6-188962), there is a technology which a sheet such as a telephone directory or an address book is set on an OCR device, a telephone number of a call opposite party is read optically, and a telephone body enables calling to the read telephone number.
This technology is an excellent system when a target sheet for reading telephone number is mainly a telephone directory, an address book or the like. However, it is difficult to directly deal with a name card where a mixture of different character strings such as a company name, a one's post, a name, a telephone number etc. are written.
Further, for example, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2 (1990)-72752 (JPA 2-72752), there is a technology which has a distinctive feature when a sheet such as a name card where a telephone number character has been written is set on an OCR device, and a numeral of a telephone number is extracted from written character data obtained by optical reading.
That is, attention is paid to a particular character preceding the numeral of the telephone number, for example, a character or mark of “telephone” and “TEL” written on the sheet by printing or the like, and identification is made as to whether there is such a particular character or not in the written character data which been optically read. If there is a particular character, a subsequent numeral is determined to be a telephone number, and a call is made to this determined numeral (telephone number) by using a personal computer or the like.
The following disadvantages are inherent in the conventional telephone system.
A first disadvantage is that even if there is a name card of a party for telephone communication, since a telephone number has not been registered in a telephone directory function of the personal computer, a method of writing the telephone number in the telephone directory by a keyboard operation or a method of making a call by a direct dialing operation must be employed, and thus usability is low.
A second disadvantage is that since a user himself must determine whether a kind of the telephone number written in the name card is actually necessary or not, and dial the telephone number when it is actually necessary after the determination, troublesome determination and a complex operation are imposed on the user.
A third disadvantage is that the telephone number data obtained by using the OCR device or the like cannot be corrected, and the telephone number obtained by reading the sheet such as a name card cannot be corrected. This is attributed to the fact that since calling by using the telephone number obtained by reading is automatically started, verification before the calling is impossible.
A fourth disadvantage is that if there are a plurality of telephone numbers written on the sheet such as a name card, the user cannot select a telephone number for a call or make continuous calls. This is attributed to the fact that if there are a plurality of lastly obtained telephone numbers, the user has no right of choice of the telephone numbers.